Enhancing the Value of SharePoint 2013 Search for Your Organisation

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Search has been extremely popular with organisations looking for a collaboration platform, intranet portals, content & document management, extranet, websites and a whole host of other use cases. The solution can be easily integrated into virtually any other system and has the ability to provide workflows for information management and automate business processes.

SharePoint 2013 Search Icon

SharePoint 2013 Search

The solution’s intuitive Microsoft Office like interface, new mobile browser experience, and flexible web tools (designed for non-technical users) have been contributing factors for its success with users worldwide. As a result SharePoint has become the most popular collaboration platform, with large scale adoption by Enterprise organisations.

In an addition to all this, SharePoint has the added benefit of a fully integrated Enterprise search engine – SharePoint 2013 Search, at no additional cost. This enables organisations to quickly search for relevant documents, communities, people or sites. Organisations have the opportunity to exploit the embedded search engine and gain a significant ROI on their SharePoint 2013 investment, particularly when considering renewals of legacy search technologies.

SharePoint 2013 Search

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 search is based on the leading FAST technology (acquired by Microsoft in 2008) with specific concepts from its Search Server Express, Bing internet search solution and a query parsing framework. The solution also provides useful functionalities such as preview of Microsoft Office files in search results (hover over results), deep links to relevant sections and chapters, and faceted navigation of search queries. However it is important to note that SharePoint 2013 Search does not offer all of the equivalent functionalities of FAST ESP, and more importantly the search is restricted primarily to content held in SharePoint and other Microsoft applications, along with a small number of connectors to such things as FileShares.

To really take advantage of SharePoint 2013 Search, a few points have to be considered in order to impose it as ‘Enterprise’ grade. Below are examples of some of the features to consider on the path for true Enterprise searching:

1. Discover relevant information from across all of your Enterprise data silos.

In today’s world where organisations keep data in distributed repositories and hosting itself is varied (onsite, cloud or hybrid), it is important to have access to all of the organisation’s data to ensure that employees can find valuable information. As a result employees can leverage existing knowledge, improve productivity, respond to clients’ request swiftly, and easily innovate on products and services. One way to achieve this is to migrate all of the organisations’ information from dispersed repositories into the SharePoint platform, however in most cases this may raise the following issues:

SharePoint does not provide all the required system functionality as legacy systems: Legacy repositories and applications have years of data, and more importantly provides the relevant functionality and processes for the data held. The legacy system has been selected to serve a business purpose and requires certain workflows and processes to adhere to this. An example of this include Records Management solutions which govern record documents and provides the relevant retention and disposition policies and workflows.

High infrastructure and migration costs: The size of the SharePoint estate will subsequently incur additional costs, which in many cases could be higher than that of the legacy repositories. Additionally, the associated costs and time to migrate the information and the potential of spoilation of data during migration can be a great put-off. It may therefore be better to leave the information where it is and look into the ‘Search First’ strategy to migration.

Taking into consideration the above, it is important to extend the capabilities of SharePoint Search beyond the Microsoft ecosystem, providing an innovative solution that delivers broader search results, giving users a holistic view of the Enterprise information.

Enterprise Search with SharePoint 2013

Enterprise Search with SharePoint 2013

2. Improve Relevancy and Enrichment from 3rd Party Systems

Key to Enterprise search is its relevancy ranking and this can only be achieved with a centralised index that delivers the best overall enterprise-wide results. By comparison, federation of third party results raises challenges of how to merge result sets generated by disparate ranking algorithms. At best, a federated solution is a compromise. Federated search has additional problems as it is difficult to implement query suggestions, or offer a consistent set of filters and facets to manage the results list.

It is therefore imperative to have a centralised index to take into consideration a fair view of the content and metadata. Most third party systems have the benefit of having additional associated tags and metadata, vital to the document’s integrity. As search-based business applications become the norm, enrichment provides flexible, powerful content to support search solution development and improve content findability.

3. Solve bandwidth and latency problems

Geographically diverse organisations are very likely to have content located around several different locations globally. Often content is stored in distributed Information Management Systems (IMS) – such as Document Management Systems, Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning systems, Shared drives, etc. This situation can become problematic if employees in these organisations are expected to access, share and collaborate on documents even though they are physically stored in different locations.

SharePoint 2013 Search Graphic logo

SharePoint 2013 Search

Transporting large and ever growing binary documents over the WAN to and from IMS repositories is expensive and provides a poor user experience where there is limited bandwidth available. Because of the expense and complexity of including remote content into central document repositories, document sets are often excluded altogether, inadvertently devaluing the objective of sharing and collaborating on corporate intellectual property.

To address these issues, organisations must find a way to provide access and improve findability to the distributed content. The SharePoint 2013 Search index can be centralised, whilst the Information Management system can remain distributed. The Search system needs to follow certain standards for the solution to be valid:

● Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process to be done at each remote document source, resulting in an indexing stream several orders of magnitude smaller in size than the original binary content.
● Preview of documents in the Search platform itself, without needing to download the document each time. This allows the user to only download or check out a full binary version of a document once they are sure it is what they are looking for.

These points result in a user experience that provides seamless access to content regardless of where the documents may reside geographically while maintaining existing security policies.

4. Security

In the Enterprise world, the security of organisation’s content is vital. Every Enterprise system has logins and getting data that employees need based on their permissions while not exposing information to which they don’t have rights is an absolute must.

Subsequently it is important to have a unified, trans-repository security model which respects the security credentials and policies of all Enterprise content, whatever methodologies are in use (Active Directory, SharePoint groups or any application’s bespoke security model). The security model also needs an efficient approach that eliminates the need for re-indexing, should content or user permissions change, ensuring the right content is served only to the right people, at query time.

How can the above be achieved?
Fortunately there are third party solutions available to overcome the limitations listed and help firms unlock SharePoint 2013 Search to deliver unified information access. Additionally these solutions provide powerful enhanced features and applications (i.e. in-preview search, heatmaps, asynchronous document loading, hit highlighting, browsing – taxonomy refiners, email bundling, etc) to improve user experience and in most cases result in organisations achieving an uplift in SharePoint user adoption. A combination of connectors, preview and trans-repository security model will help Enterprises gain that instant ROI to their SharePoint 2013 investment.

Summary of key benefits include:
● Unified information access with SharePoint 2013 as the single interface into Enterprise systems.

● Reduction in costs and consolidations of point solutions – expensive legacy stand-alone Enterprise search solutions can now finally be retired!

● Improved relevancy with the use of a centralised SharePoint index – federation does not cut-it!

● Gain benefits from existing business systems and still surface relevant information.

● Improved indexing speed, reduced query latency and administration efforts – especially for geographically dispersed organisations.

● Benefit from the wider Microsoft Community.

Essential Guide To Enterprise Search In SP2013

About the author: RAVN Systems
RAVN Systems has a combined experience of over 50 years in Enterprise Search, Unstructured Big Data analytics, Knowledge Management and Cognitive Computing technology solutions. RAVN offer revolutionary, search-based solutions and capabilities across a broad spectrum of industry verticals. RAVN’s solutions and expertise deliver long-term value and competitive advantage from unstructured information and through deep analytics capabilities, mitigates business risk.

By Deepan Hari, Sales Executive, RAVN Systems

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